The prowess of the Atlas Lions, combined with the precious support provided by the Moroccan public during this adventure, offered the Kingdom an unprecedented opportunity to shine and the tourism sector a boost on which to capitalize.
Indeed, the destination Morocco has experienced, since the start of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, an unprecedented international enthusiasm, hoisting it to the forefront of the world scene, paving the way for a new rebound in national tourism.
In a press release published earlier, the Ministry of Tourism, Handicrafts and the Social and Solidarity Economy stressed that the monitoring of trends carried out by the department’s teams since the start of the World Cup attests to an interest without precedent for Morocco, particularly in the ranks of celebrities and opinion leaders who represented 40% of people who spoke positively about Morocco.
This interest has also affected the most influential international media, which have spontaneously produced very impactful coverage of the Kingdom, reveals the same source, reporting more than 13 million “Morocco” mentions and more than 130 million interactions per users around Morocco content on social networks.
This was obviously accentuated after the passage of the national team to the knockout stages. According to the ministry, this is a legendary performance ” when we know that a normal average over the year is around 500,000 mentions of Morocco“.
For her part, the Minister of Tourism, Handicrafts and the Social and Solidarity Economy, Fatim-Zahra Ammor, said in an interview with MoroccoLatestNews that ” the national team achievement had an early impact and will certainly have a longer term impact“. The minister noted that mentions on social networks relating to Morocco exploded after the historic feat of the Atlas Lions.
As for the actions carried out by the supervisory ministry to accompany this achievement, Ammor underlined that in the short term, ” we have referenced the Morocco destination in the search engines so that it goes up much more quickly and much more easily. We have also launched promotional actions with online travel agencies, such as Expedia or Trip Advisor, because we felt that there is a craze at the international level.“.
In the medium term, we have seen a particular interest from certain countries “in terms of intention to visit Morocco, notes the minister, specifying that research now focuses only on the level of historical countries” like European countries, but we have seen new emerging countries, such as the United States, Argentina, Brazil, sub-Saharan African countries, and also the Middle East“.
” So today, we are working with the ONMT to precisely promote Morocco in these countries, which finally started to talk about Morocco, which they knew little or nothing at all before. This feat, she confided.
In this sense, the department of Ammor has given its impetus to quickly and concretely convert this global interest into tourist arrivals, while at the same time launching a more global reflection around an acceleration plan in the short and medium term.